Multi-Cloud Migrations with VMware Clouds
Connecting Multi-Cloud with VMware HCX
Welcome to this multi-cloud demonstration using VMware HCX.
The purpose of this demonstration is to show you how HCX enables you to migrate and run your business applications in any VMware-based cloud without downtime.
To begin, you will review a logical overview of the lab you are working with and then dive into the lab environment.
On the opening screen, you see the vision of what’s possible with the VMware Multi-Cloud. Starting in the middle is VMware Cloud Foundation, a self-managed private cloud that is deployed and managed with automation. This provides local cloud capabilities in your private datacenter.
In the public clouds are VMware Cloud on AWS, a VMware managed Public Cloud infrastructure delivered in AWS Datacenters. Next is our VMware Cloud Provider clouds. These clouds include multiple hyperscalers, including Google Cloud VMware Engine, Azure VMware Solution, Oracle Cloud VMware Solution, and Alibaba Cloud VMware Service, just to name a few.
Within the VMware based multi-cloud, you can migrate and run your business applications anywhere. As shown, the application VMs can freely move between any of these clouds. Even between completely different provider clouds.
In this lab, you will see this multi-cloud vision come to life by connecting three VMware based clouds with VMware HCX. VMware HCX enables you to connect multiple clouds together quickly and easily, and VMware HCX is now ready for your Tier 1 enterprise applications, as HCX now includes a new feature that provides high availability Layer 2 network extension appliances.
In this diagram, you can see that within the lab, you will be extending a single layer 2 network from VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) to a VMware Cloud Provider and extending this same L2 network to VMC on AWS as well. This single L2 subnet will be operating across 3 different clouds. Allowing you to move your business applications wherever you need them most.
In this lab, we deployed a two-tier application running an OpenCart web application. Two VMs are Web Servers, and the third VM is a SQL Database for the web application. In this demo, our busy season is coming, and in order to prepare for the seasonal sales rush, you will be moving one of the Web servers to VMC on AWS running in the AWS US East 1 datacenter so that it can have access to more resource capacity in the Public Cloud. The second web server will be moved to your new VMware Cloud Provider capacity. The VMware Cloud Provider has been deployed to a facility located in Seattle, WA. The SQL database server will remain in our private datacenter in Palo Alto, California.
It's time to dive into the demo. First, you will extend the L2 network to the VMC datacenters using HCX and then you will migrate the Web application VMs without downtime.
You begin at the vSphere Client for our VCF datacenter. You can see OC-Apache-A and OC-Apache-B. these are the two web servers you will be migrating to the clouds.
Here, you can see both web servers running on the same Layer 2 network segment called OC-Web-Segment.
From the HCX dashboard, you can see that HCX is configured and running with two site pairs. The map shows the location of each datacenter. From the top, we have VMware Cloud Provder running in Seattle, WA. Then VCF running in Palo Alto, CA, and our AWS US East 1 Data center.
From the site pairing screen, you can see that the VCF Site is connected to VMware Cloud Provder, and VMC on AWS sites.
From the interconnect screen, you can see that the multi-site service mesh has been deployed to each datacenter site, and all HCX services are up and running with green dots.
Your first task is to extend the L2 network segment that the OpenCart Web servers live on. You will extend the L2 network to both VMware Cloud Provider and VMC on AWS datacenters.
You have now extended the same L2 network into 2 additional datacenters. With the network extension complete, the web application VMs can be migrated to the VMC datacenters.
HCX will now begin the process of vMotioning the OC-Apache-A web server to our Seattle datacenter. One of the powerful features of HCX is running multiple migrations at the same time. You can start migrating the second web server right away.
The migration will begin and you can monitor the progress of the active migrations for both VMs.
The web application VMs have been moved to the VMware Cloud Provider Seattle datacenter without downtime and without changing the IP. We can now see the web application is still working completely.
You can see the website server for OC-Apache-B loads and works perfectly in this datacenter.
As expected, the VMs have remained online during the migration, and the IP addresses are still the same.
From the HCX main dashboard page you can see that the total VMs migrated has increased from three to five. And you now have 2 active network extensions.
This concludes the demo on Multi-Cloud Migrations with VMware Clouds. In this demo you were able to create Layer 2 network extensions of a single network to two different sites. You then live migrated two web applications to VMware Cloud Provider and VMC on AWS. In this demo, you have been able to see the powerful capabilities of the VMware Multi-cloud, where you can migrate and run your business applications in any VMware-based cloud without downtime. Only VMware gives you the freedom to choose where to run your application workloads.
To learn more about VMware Cloud Foundation, VMware Cloud Providers or VMC on AWS visit our website at VMware.com